The European Commission will soon launch a new digital strategy, Andrus Ansip, the European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Single Market said at a round table on the subject. Europeans are clear as to the broad range and competitive prices which the Internet – the world’s biggest market – has to offer. But there are numerous barriers they have to overcome if they want to travel the old continent online. However, if a digital single market were to be put in place, an additional growth of EUR 250 billion can be generated over the next 4-5 years, comments Deputy Prime Minister Tomislav Donchev.

Estonian commissioner Andrus Ansip comments:

Minister of Transport and Information Technology Ivaylo Moskovski presented the main components of the e-government platform: connecting public registers, Internet identification, providing 29 regions of Bulgaria with high-speed Internet. The projects are going ahead as scheduled and there will be no delay. The Northwestern region of Bulgaria which is notoriously the most underdeveloped region within the EU has been included in a joint project, implemented on EU funding, together with Romania and Serbia. Minister Moskovski said he was pleased with state-business cooperation in the sphere of information technologies.

That it is the e-government and not highways or retrofitting that is the government’s top priority was made clear by Tomislav Donchev, Deputy Prime Minister for EU Funds and Economic Policies in his report. E-government is relied upon to make the economy more competitive. Minister Donchev:

“The new public procurement act we are drafting which will be finalized by mid-2015 will provide the legal framework for the practice of e-procurement. With the help of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, we have already set up a public e-procurement department. We have ensured financing for the entire process under the Good Governance Operational Programme.”

Prime Minister Boyko Borissov on his part said he had got the idea to have traffic police patrols with cameras from Estonia. In his words, digitalizing traffic officers in Estonia had brought corruption down drastically. The Prime Minister also promised to provide Bulgarian customs officers with cameras.

English version: Milena Daynova